Almost as soon as news of the massacre of scores of people in Nice was known
and when by their own admission the motives of its author were still unknown
to them, the French government officials issued appeals to “national unity”
to “war” against “Islamic terrorism”. In a televised statement that night,
President Hollande said France would “reinforce [its] actions in Syria and
Iraq”.

The government itself so underlined the existence of a causal link between
terrorist attacks in France and imperialist military intervention in Iraq
and Syria (and Libya). Since the summer of 2014, along with a number of
soldiers present on the ground, the French air force has been involved in
bombings carried out in Iraq by the coalition led by the United States;
since September 2015, the French Air Force has taken part in the bombing in
Syria. According to an NGO, bombings by coalition aircraft in both countries
caused in only 6 months (December 2015-May 2016) the deaths of between 1100
and 1560 civilians (1).

Also for months French “Special Forces” commandos have been “active”, more
or less clandestinely, in the fighting in Syria and Libya, alongside the US
and British military.

It is this warlike intervention in the Middle East that the government wants
to reinforce, cynically using the emotion caused by the carnage in Nice to
ensure its legitimacy and support among the population. With almost total
media support which multiply the martial declarations, this bourgeois
propaganda was enhanced by the debauch of nationalism which reached
unprecedented levels during the recent European football championship.

To denounce the military intervention of French imperialism, to reject calls
for national unity with the capitalists and the bourgeois state, to oppose
all attempts to divide the workers according to nationality, race or
religion, to manifest solidarity with the struggles of undocumented workers
and migrants: such are the elementary requirements of the struggle of
the proletariat against the economic and social and political war lead by
the government on behalf of the bosses and national and international
capitalism. Capitalism, whatever its nationality, is moved only by sordid
bourgeois interests and its imperialist foreign policy is only the
continuation of its anti-proletarian domestic policy.

To place trust in the bourgeois state and its political representatives in
order to obtain a “protection” against terrorism whether this is the work of
a particular Middle Eastern force or of mentally-deranged individuals, can
only mean for the proletariat to accept remaining the passive cannon fodder
of guns or bombs by putting its fate into the hands of those who live by its
exploitation, and who are its class enemies.

What is demonstrated by the killings in Nice and Orlando, the attacks in
Paris or Brussels, is that even in the richest and most powerful imperialist
countries, those who dominate and plunder the planet with impunity; the
bourgeois democratic political system is less and less able to prevent the
explosion of the growing contradictions of capitalism and the manifestations
of the violence that is the basis of all social relations. The bourgeois
ideological myths of social progress, peace, freedom, equality and
fraternity, has growing difficulties in hiding the reality of this
oppressive, murderous, exploitative capitalist society, where the
fundamental law is the mad dash for profit which inevitably leads to
contempt for human life; this contempt is found not only in police
repression, military interventions by States and the bombing of cities, but
also in terrorist violence by various reactionary groups, and even in the
relationships between individuals and domestic violence.

As a means to escape this vicious circle of killings and military
interventions that will otherwise lead inevitably to a third world war, it
would be tragically utopian to seek to reform capitalism: throughout its
existence, it has without cessation immersed humanity in ever more deadly
wars and disasters. Only traitors or sold-out lackeys can try to hoodwink us
about a “democratization” of capitalism and a “pacification” of its
international relations.

The only solution is based on the class war against capitalism, the
international proletarian revolution to establish the power of the oppressed
and exploited, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition
phase necessary to end the bloody society of capital and to move towards
communism, a society without war or oppression, without markets or money,
without classes or states.

But for this solution to become possible, the proletariat will have to
engage on the path of the class struggle: the path of struggle and
organization for the exclusive defense of its immediate and long-term
interests, in direct opposition to interests of the propertied classes and
with complete independence from the forces and institutions linked in one
way or another to social conservation. Only its reorganization into a class
and consequently into a party (the Communist Manifesto), will enable
it to fight successfully against the capitalists and their state and to
cease being sacrificed on the altar of the destructive rivalries and deadly
contradictions of the bourgeoisie. It will also give the proletariat the
opportunity to lead at least some of the petty bourgeois strata ruined by
the crisis, intoxicated by the degeneration of present society, in this
anti-capitalist struggle – those who otherwise can be driven into the worst
reactionary dead ends – by offering the concrete and in no way illusory
objective of the combat to gain a society which is at last really human.

If this seems a distant perspective today, it is the only realistic one.

For the resumption of the proletarian class struggle!

Down with the society of capital, long live the world communist revolution!

(1) cf:airwars.org/news/international-airstrikes-and-civilian-casualties-in-iraq-and-syria-december-
2015-to-may-2016. If the majority of the bombing in Iraq was the work of the
Americans (eg 5850 airstrikes in Iraq), the coalition allies have not
remained inactive: 761 airstrikes by the British and 670 by the French 670.